18 LinkedIn Apps, Tools, and Resources

I tweeted the other day about LinkedIn’s Resume Builder and I got a number of surprising responses from people I would have assumed would already know that LinkedIn had a resume builder.

LinkedIn has been cranking out new features and tools, and I realize that it’s too easy for me to assume that everyone else knows what I know, so I’m compiling all of the interesting offerings LinkedIn has released in 1 place for easy consumption.

While you may be familiar with some of them, I can almost guarantee you aren’t familiar with ALL of them.

Resume Builder

I’ve been waiting for this for a LONG time, and I wasn’t surprised to see LinkedIn create a resume builder that allows people to turn their LinkedIn profiles into Word and PDF resumes.

It’s as easy as picking a template, editing and arranging the information, and exporting and printing or sharing via email, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

At the time of this post, there were over 19,000 Resume Builder users, but as more people become aware of this feature, I think the number will increase rapidly.

You can give it a try by clicking here. As long as you completely fill out your LinkedIn profile as you would a resume, you don’t have to worry about saving your resume on your computer or on flash drives – your resume can live in the LinkedIn cloud.

LinkedIn – if you’re reading this – I’d like to see an “apply with your LinkedIn profile” feature in the near future, but something tells me you’re already working on it. :-)

InMaps

If you attended Talent Connect 2010, you had the chance to get your LinkedIn network graphed out on paper. That should have given folks a heads-up that something like InMaps was in development, and now anyone can visualize their professional network, “clustered in realtime based on their inter-relationships.”

Unless, of course, you have a large network. But they’re working on it. :-)

NewIn

LinkedIn now boasts over 90M members worldwide, and people join LinkedIn at a rate of 1 per second.

If you want to see what that looks like, all you have to do is have Google Earth installed and click here.

Here’s a screenhot that doesn’t do NewIn justice:

I’ve found NewIn to be great when delivering webinars or training sessions – it certainly provides some “wow factor” for anyone who hasn’t seen it, because it’s one thing to say that a new member joins LinkedIn every second, and another entirely to visualize it.

Swarm

Although LinkedIn’s official description of Swarm is “an eerily beautiful visualization of popular company search queries on LinkedIn,” I’ve seen popular title searches, most recent LinkedIn blog posts, most shared news, and recent jobs posted on LinkedIn.

Oh, and the terms are all clickable so you can explore them in LinkedIn.

Infinity

LinkedIn Infinity is a visualization of your professional network that was built using the LinkedIn Javascript APIs.

Once you log in by clicking the “Sign in with LinkedIn” button, you can click and drag on the wall to navigate through your contacts, zoom in and out, and search by name, title or status update.

At least that’s what I think you can do. When I sign into Infinity, I don’t see my network – but that is likely due to my network size, as I also can’t get InMaps to work either.

Signal

LinkedIn’s Signal certainly isn’t new, but it is one of the most powerful services they’ve released.

Signal allows you to filter and browse only relevant status updates from your LinkedIn and Twitter streams. You can target updates from colleagues, competitors, etc., and narrow or expand your view based on the following filters: Network, Industry, Company, Time published, Location, School or just most popular hash tags.

You can also search for keywords, topics or people across the stream of network updates, and tap into an auto updated real-time stream of filtered content. Additionally, you can save your real time searches for quick and easy access.

Imagine saving searches to allow you to check in every day and see a real-time stream of updates from every employee in your company. Or, perhaps even better, a competitor!

Signal also mines all the shared links on status updates and shows you the most popular links, many of which are the hottest news stories on that topic, updated to the minute, and you can see who’s shared any of those Trending Links.

Here’s an example of me checking in on who’s talking about Hadoop. I can instantly which companies are talking about it as well as Trending Links.

ChromeIn

If you use Google’s Chrome browser (I do), you may be interested in being able to integrate LinkedIn directly into the browser, giving you the ability to share things on LinkedIn and give you easy access to your LinkedIn updates at anytime.

Instant Search

Outlook Toolbar

If your company uses Outlook, depending on how tight and controlled your I.T. team is, you might have some difficulty downloading and installing LinkedIn’s Outlook toolbar, but I hope not, because it’s a great tool!

Google Toolbar

Contribute and read helpful information on any web page with Google Sidewiki

Translate web pages instantly with automatic language detection.

LinkedIn Mobile

If you don’t already use LinkedIn’s mobile apps, LinkedIn supports the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm devices to find and connect with over 90M people, get updates, and share your status – all while on the go.

LinkedIn Widget for Lotus Notes

What’s Lotus Notes?

Sorry – I couldn’t resist.

Actually, when I started in recruiting back in 1997, the company I worked for used Lotus Notes, and although it’s not as prevalent as Microsoft’s solutions, it is nice to see LinkedIn supporting companies that use Lotus Notes.

Sharing Bookmarklet

With LinkedIn’s sharing bookmarklet, you can share webpages with your professional network and groups straight from your browser even when you’re not on LinkedIn.

All you have to do is find interesting articles/content, click on “share on LinkedIn” from your browser toolbar, add a comment to put your own spin on it, and choose who you want to share it with.

LinkedIn Email Signatures

Although they’ve been around for quite some time, I still encounter people who ask me “how did you get that LinkedIn signature?”

You can create a customized LinkedIn email signature by going here and configuring the layout and the information – it’s very easy and intuitive, and they’re supported by Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird.

Of course, you can also promote your profile with customized buttons that you can include in your email signatures and elsewhere. I regularly get requests asking how to create them. They are a little difficult to find, because the link to them is hidden in a link on your public profile page of your LinkedIn settings.

When you follow the link, you can easily configure your LinkedIn buttons:

Mac Search Widget

For you Mac-lovers, LinkedIn’s got some love for you too (at least a little).

I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t show you what it looks like, but it allows you to search LinkedIn anytime from your Mac Dashboard (OS 10.4 (Tiger) required).

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads are now officially out of beta, and LinkedIn’s coming out swinging with a robust offering.

You can control how much you spend each day by selecting a bid and setting a daily budget, which represents the maximum amount you’re willing to spend each day.

You can set your budget as low as $10, and you have pay per click (CPC) and pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM). Generally, the higher you bid in the Suggested Bid Range, the more likely you are to receive impressions and clicks. Because you’re competing with other advertisers for impressions and clicks, there isn’t a set cost for LinkedIn Ads.

Thanks for sharing these resources. I’ve been diving back into LinkedIn and trying to figure out how to get more out of it and to help my clients do the same. This is a great collection and I will definitely be digging in to some of these.

Sean

Matt Hepler

Love this list Glen.

FYI – The “If you have a device other than what I listed above, you can go here.” seems broken.

For all you droid users that want to access LinkedIn there is DroidIn and DroidIn Pro (no ads, more features). It is also actively in development so if there is something that is missing it will likely be added soon.

Garybrick

And how does one access either DroidIn or DroidIn Pro? Gary

Matt Hepler

Through the Droid “Market” on your phone.

http://www.booleanblackbelt.com Glen Cathey

Thanks Matt! I was a bit confused by the link at first, but it is the one provided directly from the LinkedIn site as well: http://m.linkedin.com/session/new, and I just tested it on my iPhone using Safari. You just need to navigate the link from a mobile device/browser. Definitely not an app, but it does enable LinkedIn mobile functionality from any phone with a browser.

http://twitter.com/CaraBarone Cara Barone

Awesome list Glen. Where is the app for the droid!!

http://twitter.com/CaraBarone Cara Barone

Thanks! I’ll try downloading it again, had it before and it wasn’t what I was looking for.

as I do lot of writing, are there any apps that’ll make it easier to automate my writing so it appears over the course of say 1 wk or so?
Thks

http://www.linkedin.com/in/willchamberlain William Chamberlain

Thanks for sharing! Well constructed.

JobCred CV Builder

Do you think that you will ever use the LinkedIn resume builder when you apply for jobs that are not posted on LinkedIn? External CV and Resume builders like JobCred still allow you to import the LinkedIn profile. However, they give you the possibility to add confidential information to your CV/Resume profile. You could or should never post that information on your public LinkedIn profile, but it would make your CV much more specific and thus more attractive to employers and recruiters.

Another point is that when you send your resume or CV to an employer, you do not want this resume to be branded with LinkedIn or any other logo. Just be aware that there are professional external resume builders that import from LinkedIn, that are free and that do not put their logo on your resume or CV.

Thanks for sharing! I have a quick question after reading your profile. What do you recommend as a good CRM for building real solid relationships with candidates, but also doubles as a good contact manger and campaign manger (i.e. marketing). I’ve used PCR for AppTracking, aWeber for marketing, and various others for contact management, but I really need to merge everything in one place so I can build stronger relationships, while keeping good lists to deliver my information when someone has a request for it. Any suggestions? Thanks!

We have developed an application to export your linkedin search into excel.

Our challenge was to build a solid list of prospects using LinkedIn and doing a saved search was a great start but was not very user friendly as it would take hours and hours of copy+paste work to get it into an excel sheet and eventually having a .csv file to import into our CRM (sales force or netsuite for example).

We used other tools out there and there are some good ones and some less good ones, the main problem as we saw it was the cost.

We ended up building our own app for this and are soon to open up the gates for distributing this app at a much lower cost.